Lesson plan

Using stories in the classroom

Topic
‘The Emperor's new clothes' by Hans Christian Andersen

Aims
• To develop students' ability to reconstruct a grammatically and textually coherent piece of writing
• To provide practice in prediction skills in order to ease the understanding of a new text
• To provide practice in gist listening in order to encourage students to not focus on difficult vocabulary
and thus make authentic listening texts more accessible
• To provide practice in scanning a text for information
• To by the end of this lesson the students will be able to successfully form past simple object questions
in writing

Age group
Teen

Level
A2+

Time
60+ minutes

Materials
• Using stories in the classroom student worksheet

Introduction
This lesson is aimed at lower intermediate students. It could be adapted for use with higher and lower
levels.

This particular lesson uses an adapted version of ‘The Emperor's new clothes' by Hans Christian
Andersen, but other stories can be used in the same way.

Procedure
 Lesson plan
1. Introduction • Start by eliciting different types of leaders: king, queen, president, prime
(5 mins) minister, emperor etc.
• Ask students what kind of a personality they think a good leader needs.
• Tell them you are going to read the beginning of a story about a leader and
that they need to listen very carefully as they will need to reproduce the text
from memory. Tell them that you will read it twice but that they are not
allowed to make notes at this stage.

2. Task 1: • Put the students into pairs and write their names on the left hand side of the
Reading (15 board. Each pair has 3 ‘lives’. Draw 3 lines next to each pairs’ names to
minutes) represent their ‘lives’.
• Read the text twice (Use the teacher’s numbered square sheet).
• Hand out the worksheet with the numbered blank squares (task1). Tell them
that each box represents a word from the text.
• Ask each pair in turn to suggest a word that they remember hearing from the
text. (The words do not need to be in order).
• If the word is present, tell them which number it is and the students write it in
the correct box. Make sure you cross out the word on your copy, so you know
which words have been ‘found’.
• If the word is not there or has already been called out, the pair loses a life.
Wipe off one of the lines from the board to show how many lives they have
left.
• Continue going round the classroom until the whole story has been
reconstructed or all the pairs have run out of lives. Finally read out the text
again.

Many years ago there

1 2 3 4

lived an emperor who

5 6 7 8

loved clothes. He liked

9 10 11 12
 Lesson plan
them so much he

13 14 15 16

changed his clothes almost

17 18 19 20

every hour and loved

21 22 23 24

to show them off

25 26 27 28

to his People.

29 30 31

3. Task 2: • Pre-teach vocabulary: give the students the handouts with definitions of
Vocabulary vocabulary (worksheet 2) and write the vocabulary on the board. Students
Focus (5-10 have to match the vocabulary with the definitions. (Vocabulary on board:
minutes) show something off, vanity, invisible, silk, confused, magnificent, procession,
naked)

4. Task 3: • Give the students 3 possible ways the story might end (Task 3 on worksheet),
Reading and and ask them in pairs to guess which they think is correct. Alternatively, just
prediction (5-10 ask students to discuss how they think the story might end, without the
minutes) options.
• Get some feedback, and then read the whole story so students can check
who predicted correctly.
 Lesson plan

5. Task 4: Focus • Write on the board, ‘Clothes’, ‘Every hour’, and ‘About the Emperor’s vanity’.
on question Ask the students what questions would give these answers. Write the
forms (10- 15 questions on the board: What did the Emperor love? How often did he
minutes) change his clothes? What did the thieves hear about?
• Elicit Question, Auxiliary, Subject, Infinitive on the board

Q A S I

What did the emperor love?

How often did he change his clothes?

What did the thieves hear about?

• Remind students that this structure is used with present simple and past simple
object questions and that QASI can be an easy way to remember how to form these
questions.

• Divide the class into As and Bs and give everyone a copy of the whole story (on the
worksheet). Then give answer sheet A to group A and sheet B to group B, and ask
them to write appropriate questions for each of the answers on a separate sheet (this
can be done in pairs). Monitor carefully and remind them of QASI.

• The groups then swap questions and have to try to answer them using the story
(again, this works best in pairs). Once they have written their answers, they can
swap the papers again and check each other’s answers.

• Finally, you can have a class discussion about what the message of the story is.

Contributed by
Janet Shackleton